I've been trying RH8.0 now for 2 months and believe me, I like open source alot.

I love the way RH8.0 looks and the ideas behind it are really good and practical. Things like the GUI and being able to run packages from windows and even press an extract button instead of using the shell..

But the thing is, though it's all nice and the intentions are really great.......... Installing software is a freaking hassle!....
I've been trying to install some programs on linux for the last 2 months and I almost can't get anything to work!

The problem is NOT that I don't understand how to follow some instruction docs or install seperate libs or anything like that.....because I DO...
The problem is that the instructions, when followed, mostly lead to other errors wich in their turn also take ages to solve. It's crazy to sit and install a program for a week, and then it still doesn't work....

For instance......

I've been trying to install giFT for 1 week now and I understand the docs fully. I just follow the installation doc on the website. No big deal..
giFT needs some libs installed to work properly so I found them on the net and downloaded them..... Now for the installation...

Everytime I install a library for giFT it gives me an error message saying that it depends on a different library to install. That means that it doesn't install without that other lib already installed.

So I search the net and try install the other required one.....but hey... the same problem... Why?....Well, because this lib TOO is dependend on again a different lib in order to be installed....

So I look for that one....I can't find it...........and when I finally do..... It TOO has dependency problems.... I don't understand that for instance there is no complete library package of libs on the giFT website wich can be downloaded and so that nothing depends on anything else.....
Examples of these errors go on and on and on and on.....

So now I dropped the installation because I don't feel like spending more time on it....

So my opinion on linux ?

The intentions are great... but theory and practise do not always follow each other smoothly. They wanted RH 8.0 to be user friendly and they say that EVERYONE can use it...... well... yes it's true...but only if you stick to the standard CD-rom packages.... Because then you stick to the 'closed-and-controlled' enviremont and yes, ofcourse it's user friendly, it's all preconfigured and setup. Once you step out of that, you're back in the Open source world where there is no such thing. It's a good thing that the users in the open source world help each other so nicely through forums like this one ......

I'm still impressed though that a package such as red hat is on the level that it is. It looks great but I find the installations of programs on linux systems in general still to be s*!t because I don't have the time or the nerves for them most of the time.


LG

try rpm --force --nodeps and see if it works, sometimes it tells you it depends on a lib that's already in your computer but in your computer it named differently in the rpm system.

yeah, I agree with what u say, microsoft tries to remain compatible so old programs will usually install/run on newer versions of windows, in linux a year 2000 program may not install/run on a 2003 computer & there're many vendors, a suse rpm will not install on a redhat computer, etc.

Welcome to rpm-hell!
And for a solution you should really take a look at Gentoo. I see you are not afraid to get your hands dirty, so I think Gentoo is just the distro for you, as it is for me.

dependencies are what makes linux, and unix in general, great (among many many many other thigns of course) the fact that programs share so much common code is brilliant, and means that each application can concentrate on doing what it does best without haveing the hassle of dealing with other features no key to it's purpose, as an existing library already exists and is some other guys pet project.... deps are a small hurdle, but looking at the bigger picture it's very minor really. if unix wasn't based on modularised libraries and such like then linux would still not have gotten anywhere, as everyone would have to start from scratch to write an application, like on windows.

All I have to say is that Linux is the best thing that has ever happened to the corporate IT world! I know from experience. It may be hard to learn at first, but when you do it pays off to have a stable and secure server running.

I have been using Debian Woody for a few months and just love it. Its very fast (much faster than M$). The big plus for Debian is the fact that a good many of the popular programs have Debian packages which means that the installation is an absolute breeze. I have done a number of installations from source tarballs and with the odd exception thay have gone extremely smoothly. The learning curve is very steep I must admit.

My worst go involved getting about 20 or more dependicies in, resolving them and having the app crash anyway, which was why I was attempting to compile it. Thinking the binary was just not working right I thought a version compiled on my PC would be better. HA!
Usually things aren't that bad.
As you probably can guess, your choice is to either see it through or give up. In my case, when I saw what I was in for I rescheduled the attempt for a Sunday afternoon of cursing.
Good Luck.

One elegant solution - use Mandrake, and set up several URPMI-friendly software repositories (I have 3 decent ones set up). A good example of how nice this setup is - I read an article about some audio apps - rezound was one that looked good. I opened a terminal as root, and typed "urpmi rezound". All dependencies were located and downloaded, including the main app.

So, RPMs needn't be a hassle.